Decided to spend a week at friends summer-house near Tartu, where the whole small town is built around the observatory. Quiet and mostly with low light pollution, it was one of the best places in Estonia to shoot stars in summer.

center of milky way galaxy and Tartu-Tõravere Meteorological Station

Weather station with center of Milky way galaxy

When I was done with camera set-up, the telescope turned on and directed itself to Milky way

Tartu observatory and outer side of the Milky way galaxy

On Other side of the telescope, you can see what it was investigating

Center of Milky way galaxy

Wanted to try some light painting with bike flash, but it was too damn dark to position me to the center of telescope. That’s the closest I got 🙂 Next time I’LL use my portable flash so it will catch less movement and get sharper shot of the model

Small telescopes near Tartu observatory

This was my first try on capturing night sky and i’ve learned a lot! I’d list them here for readers not to repeat my mistakes

Use highest ISO possible(not max, highest that doesn’t have too much noise). For my Canon 6D it was ISO-6400

Don’t focus to infinity, turn back the notch just a little bit.

If possible don’t use wide aperture, my f/2.5 didn’t keep everything crispy and sharp. Next time I’ll turn it up one step.

Make panoramas for WOW effect.

Dont go over 30 sec shutter, it will leave trails. Best results were with 25-28 sec

Lightroom has a Dehaze slider, use it to make stars pop up even more 🙂

Here in Tallinn things are getting out of hand and my cheap 30$ ventilator doesn’t do the trick anymore. For every situation there’s always a solution; for escaping burning sun, it is to dive head in, flip the sun, and bike around.

My first intention was to go out, bike with my bud and consume cold beverages, so I didn’t really capture everything I saw, sorry for mediocre reportage.

First stop was Paljassaare (naked island) reservoir near Tallinn. For our surprise it had new inhabitants. Cows were brought here recently to get rid of excessive reed in the coastline and keep people from entering birds protection area. Cows of course were really curious to see creatures from other side of the fence.

Some looked very cute and goofy

Some just friking weird

After some adventures we found an abandoned building. No idea what it’s purpose was, but I took this odd photo of 2 kayakers

Road that lead us there

After that we saw some interesting places, but beverages were kicking in and I had too much fun so couldn’t think about making photos. 4 hours later we landed in park near Tallinn University of Technology and started to burn some “greenery”. In some point I saw small brave evergreen tree and thought I have to record this cutie to blockchain

Another 4 hours later, sun was setting, but it still was warm, so we decided to continue drinking outside near a cool hipster bar F-hoone (after 10pm the only way to buy beer is in bars).

3 hours later none of us had energy left and we decided to HFS (home-fap-sleep)